"So who is in charge of finding WMD?"

Billmon is excellent here in finding Dubya's ultimate alibi in recent revelations about the (nonexistence of) the Flaming Winnebagos of Death. I'm not sure I'm as ready as he is to let the chimp off the hook but he makes a good case.

I realize that at this point I'm kind of beating a dead horse -- or a dying administration's dead crediblity, as the case may be. But I think it's important to keep wailing away, particularly since Big Media seems perfectly content to let them do it again.

On one count, though -- whether Shrub knew at the time that his babbling lies about the Flaming Winnebagos of Death were, in fact, lies -- I actually tend to believe the White House spin. I don't think he had a single clue one way or the other, as this report in Time (from that time) indicates:

Meeting last month [i.e. June 2003) at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: Where are the weapons of mass destruction?

Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked, "Are you in charge of finding WMD?" Bremer said no, he was not.

Bush then put the same question to his military commander, General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn't his job either.

A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD? After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a little-known deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington. Pause.

"Who?" Bush asked.

Pretty pathetic, no?

That "little known" deputy, by the way, was the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence -- a post dreamed up by Rumsfeld and his congressional enablers, and designed to be one of the most powerful jobs, if not the most powerful job, in the U.S. intelligence community. At this point, Cambone -- who is so hated inside the Pentagon a general once told Army Times that "if I had one bullet left in my revolver, I'd take out Cambone" -- is a considerably bigger cog in the secret government than Bush will ever be.

Maybe that's why the president of the United States had never heard the name: Like the classified report on the non-existent bioweapons labs, Cambone's role in the WMD snipe hunt was on a need-to-know basis -- and Shrub didn't need to know.

But while Commander Codpiece may have been as clueless as ever, and nobody seems to have told Powell anything, except what time to show up for his next photo op, is anybody seriously going to argue that Rumsfeld, Rice and Cheney didn't know they were spreading deliberate falsehoods? Cheney? The guy so obsessed with the details of the WMD fraud that he found time to scribble little notes to self ("Remember to ratfuck Joe Wilson") in the margins of New York Times clippings?

If the House Dems are serious about fishing for impeachable offenses (assuming they get control of the fishing rod this November) they could pick a worse place to start -- for Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld, I mean. For Shrub, though, I think they're going to have look elsewhere. The problem is that in the end, no matter where they look, they're probably going to run up against the Nuremberg defense -- he was only following orders.

Read the whole piece...